Group hopes that the combination will enable the rapid production and understanding of proteins.
Harvard Medical School researchers are using Lumera’s ProteomicProcessor™ Biosensor to build next-generation discovery and diagnostics methods, according to the company. The collaboration is focused on integrating Harvard’s NAPPA (Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Array) technology, which provides a way to generate a protein biochip, with the ProteomicProcessor to read and analyze the biochip.
Harvard has served as a beta site for the ProteomicProcessor since mid-2006. “In the past quarter, we have successfully narrowed the window of processing conditions to produce a ProteomicProcessor-compatible NAPPA array,” points out Joshua LaBaer, Ph.D., director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics. “We now have a solid foundation on which to begin our development efforts. Among our first areas of investigation will be probing a family of 200 kinase proteins for their interaction with and among drug families relevant to cancer research.”
“There is a significant amount of value to the pharmaceutical development market in combining these two technologies,” predicts Timothy Londergan, Ph.D., director of Lumera’s Bioscience Business. “This will ultimately lead to new products that take advantage of NAPPA’s unique capability of producing proteins on demand and the ProteomicProcessor’s unique ability to understand in great detail how the proteins are interacting with each other and with other compounds, like, for example, drug candidates. We are particularly interested in using NAPPA to generate a human protein kinase array, allowing us to address a very large and growing segment of the drug discovery market with a high value consumable product.”